February 07, 2010

The answer, my friends, is southern California. Now, it's been a few weeks since I got back, and I've just been extremely lazy about posting them. Well, and I went to Toronto for a few days, and I moved into a housesitting gig, and I spent time with my sister and niece and nephew when they came to town last week.

But earlier in January I had a wonderful, wonderful time visiting friends near LA and in San Diego. So the pictures are, in order, a giraffe at The Living Desert, knitted wire jellyfish at the Mingei museum in San Diego, and part of the Getty Center, but more the amazing late day sky.

What else? I had my first In-n-Out burger, I saw people I haven't seen in too many years, I had really good Georgian food at a very odd restaurant (which you can get a sense of from its website). I talked and talked and talked. I dabbled my feet in the Pacific (not that I haven't done that before, but I believe in doing that when one has the chance).

And now I'm back and settling down to work. And knit. I'm starting to plan for the ravelympics, but I'm not sure if the yarn I just ordered to do the most ambitious project I'm considering will arrive in time. We'll see.

In the meantime, I'm closing in on the end of this.

This is my somewhat altered version of the Cardigan for Arwen (ravelry). I've liked this pattern for ages, and I always thought this might be a nice melding of yarn and pattern. This is the yarn I used for the cable wrap thingy that I had to frog due to not enough yarn. But I loved how the cables looked in that other version, and so thought that using the yarn for something with cables made sense. Thus, this.

The somewhat altered bit is the sleeves, as you can perhaps see. The original pattern involves knitting the sleeves kind of sideways (kind of like in the sayuri pattern I just did), but I decided to knit the cuffs as bands, then pick up stitches on one side and knit up two normal sleeves, and then to join the body (which I'd knit in the round) and do raglan decreases. I'm happy with this decision. I'm just now at the hood part, so... I'm nearing the end, and can perhaps finish before the Olympics... er, ravelympics, start.

October 19, 2009

Yesterday as I was walking down a street near Vilnius University, it hit me--the old town of Vilnius oddly reminds me of Lisbon more than anything else. It's something about its lived in, slightly worn look, and the fact that it's a place that hasn't been scrubbed all clean and pretty like some other eastern European old towns have been. And it's also something to do with a lot of the architecture--there's another Baroque church around what seems like every corner, and my memory is that Lisbon had some very similar church architecture. This actually makes sense, given that Portugal and Lithuania had relatively similar periods of peak power.

One of the things that has been cleaned up is the huge cathedral that forms sort of one corner of the old town. It backs onto the river and a hill, and opens here and to the side away from where I was standing to take this onto a huge square. South of it is the old town, and west is the new town, with wider, straighter boulevards and more art nouveau.

Inside it has a few opulently decorated side chapels, and a fair number that are still under reconstruction. But the ones that are finished are...

...well, pretty spectacular.

The main body of the church is much plainer--well, maybe plain's not the right word, as this isn't exactly plain, but it is fairly stark white.

If you climb up the hill behind the church, you get views out over the river, toward another hill topped with three white crosses, and down across the city.

Once you're down in the city, you're struck by a few things. One is that this is an old city that's had a lot of bits and pieces inserted in it--there's a much bigger footprint of the twentieth century even in the old city here, with what I think are Soviet era buildings dotted here and there along with the much, much older bits.

But of course you're also struck by churches all over the place.

My favorite thing about them are the metal worked crosses at their peaks. Each one's different and each one touches my geometric fancy.

This is actually just the entrance gate to a church complex, and it's by far the most spectacular part of the place.

The inner courtyard and church are much more touched by time. Well, stained by time. And yet, still with the cross.

There are actually two churches here. The one covered in scaffolding behind the belltower is St. Anne's Church, supposedly the most spectacular church in Vilnius, the one that Napoleon wanted to take home with him after camping here in 1812. Of course it's the one covered with scaffolding during my trip. The one to the right is the church of the Bernardines (I think).

Its interior is one of the ones that shows the passage of time. But it's still sort of lovely, I think.

I could post many, many more pictures of churches, but instead I'll just show this last one, of the utterly amazing dragon downspouts on this church (of St. Catherine). I apparently have dragons on the brain on this trip, as I believe this is the third picture of dragon architectural details I've posted. But... how can I not?

October 16, 2009

The other big thing about Riga is its crazy amount of art nouveau architecture. This is not all that surprising to me given my experience of other cities from the former Russian Empire, many of which went through big periods of expansion exactly when that style was au courant. But, still, it's quite remarkable.

Some of it's just all scroll work and organic lines piled up on top of smoothly curving buildings.

An awful lot of it involves people holding up buildings.

To be totally honest, some of it's a bit too much for me as a whole--but what I do absolutely love about the style is its odd little bits and pieces of ornamentation.

Like a cat atop a tower.

Or, hey, how about two cats, a guy with a ladder, and... I can't tell, maybe an old timey hansa merchant?

Or a dragon guard.

Or an illustration.

One of the few things that makes me feel like I'm definitely in a city that has ties to the former Russian empire (other things: all the Russian spoken here, and the pelmeni) are these parts of the city. There are still these small two story wooden houses here and there. Not in the old city, which is all old old, and art nouveau, and then some twentieth century too. But here, in the area just outside the old city, which is mostly filled with art nouveau buildings, the streets still have a fair number of these older buildings. And on the west side of the river, where the archive is, there are even more of them, and fewer of the art nouveau era ones. They totally remind me of the Russian provinces--all of the provincial towns I've been to have had these still sitting side by side with newer (and sometimes older) buildings, as development has rarely completely transformed an entire street. (Moscow supposedly still had a lot of them up until the 1960s, or so a landlady once told me.)

I kind of think the plain wood buildings tend to throw these kinds of things in even starker relief--they highlight the crazy complexity of so much of the decoration, like this...

October 15, 2009

So, Riga's filled with mittens and socks. Like, there are little stands all over the old city where people hawk amber, mittens, socks, and other souvenir trinkets. All of the souvenir shops feature those two things. It's a thing, maybe particularly at this time of year.

But none of those places had as beautiful display as the one above, hanging from a wall in a store of Latvian folk costumes that's almost a museum in itself.

It reminded me to search out this link, which I saw a few years ago and was awed by--and now seeing a bunch of them in person, I get it even more. Latvian mittens are indeed a whole art form.

Did I buy mittens? No.

I bought yarn. Six 100 gram skeins of very very wooly fingering weight which will, I think, be perfect for experimenting with mittens. Or other colorful creations. Though looking at the picture above, perhaps I should have bought more of the pale base color. Hmmm. Perhaps I should go back.

(And I have to say that this yarn purchase justified my tendency to wander around department stores and shopping malls in foreign countries. I find them interesting. And this one [the one big mall in Old Riga] had a yarn store tucked away on its top floor, with a barrel of this yarn sitting there. Fantastic.)

And in a completely random happenstance, the yarn I decided to bring with me to knit on this side trip within my larger trip totally fits in with the colors I see all around me.

Kind of close to what I just bought, now that I look at it. Hmmm. I must have these colors on the brain, between the changing colors from grey green to golden of the trees in fall, the red of brick, the different grey-blues of buildings and water.

October 13, 2009

I'm in Latvia, doing some research at the national historical archive, and also really, really liking being in Riga. It's a lovely, lovely city. I got in late on Friday. My flight from Petersburg actually got me started in adventure mode, not because of anything scary with the flight, but because of a certain weirdness in line. My flight was the last one out that night, and only one other flight was even dealing with check in while I was there--a flight to Moldova. That actually caused minor hilarity, because people going to Moldova kept getting into the Riga line, and being surprised that there was more than one line. This caused the cosmopolitan Riga-bound passengers to giggle a bit at the poor country bumpkin Moldovans. Then, of course, the Air Baltic in flight magazine had a letter from the CEO of the airline apologizing for long lines for the toilets at the Riga airport. What the heck?

Anyway, even driving in from the airport in the dark, this place felt very much not like Russia (despite hearing Russian in the shuttle). And then the next morning, that feeling was confirmed. So, Riga.

I'm staying smack in the middle of Old Riga, in that yellow building on the corner there. This is taken from the spire of St. Peter's, one of the many churches in the old part of town.

It's very much a twisty turny kind of old town, with little narrow streets, old old buildings, and funny turns.

I actually have to go outside to get my breakfast (which has included fried potatoes and sausage every day... which is why I'm walking to the archive rather than taking a bus or tram), but this is the passageway I go through.

But elsewhere there are even tinier streets that bend away from the eye.

Or funny dead ends with church spires towering behind them.

And peaked roofs pile up one behind the other, too--this is the view from my hotel room, off over a courtyard to the roofs beyond. The odd shadow is cast by an oddly peaked church roof. And though it's hard to see in the small picture, there's a seagull perched atop the tallest peak.

The old town just clings to the river (the Daugava), with its spires echoed by a TV tower (I think that's what that is) to one side,

October 02, 2009

Last weekend I decided to take a trip to some of the islands that are mostly parks here--but even before I made it there, there were some sort of interesting things along the way as I walked up to catch a bus. Some were not actually all that interesting in many ways, but nonetheless struck me for various reasons. Like, say this restaurant.

No, it's nothing terribly interesting on one level. Except it appears to be a Western-themed steakhouse/saloon, named "Montana." (Incidentally, on Thursday I walked past a Mexican restaurant called "La Cucaracha.") And even weirder than that (well, maybe) is the cartoon figure the place uses.

I am, for whatever reason, always somewhat discomfited by images of animals getting ready to chow down... on themselves.

A bit further on, actually right by where I waited for a bus (for twenty minutes, since I just missed one and it was Sunday morning), there was this church, from the early 19th century.

There are actually quite a few of these small corner churches around town, but I quite liked the columns on the front of this one. But it, too, had a rather discomfiting feature. See those white rectangles on the side facing the camera?

I've never been terribly fond of the cherubs portrayed as just heads and wings. Except maybe in a few paintings I've seen where the wings are rainbow colored. But mostly, I find them slightly... well, a little creepy, to be honest.

Meanwhile, looking the other way down the street from the bus stop, there was this view, which is repeated all over St. Petersburg. There are an amazing number of yellow stuccoed buildings with white trim, often involving columns. Really, it's not just St. Petersburg. Official building plans from the early nineteenth century called for buildings like this throughout Russia, so when there were fires and towns had to be rebuilt (not an uncommon thing), a lot of buildings like this one went up.

September 27, 2009

On Friday, I left the archive and took a long, wandering walk home. This archive is located in an area called Kolomna, and it always feels several degrees colder there than in the rest of St. Petersburg. This may not be my imagination--the archive is very, very close not just to one of the rivers, but to the actual edge of the city by the Gulf of Finland.

Not too far away is a Catholic church, which is a relatively rare thing in Russia.

It's named after St. Stanislaw, and its signage is in Russian and Polish. It's an early nineteenth century classical structure.

And not too far after that is the Grand Choral Synagogue.

It's a very different sort of building (well, obviously), late nineteenth century and Byzantine in style--it makes quite a different statement on the street, though now one that's sadly emphasized by a guard post outside the door.

Then as you walk around, particularly, as here, when you get over on the Moika River, the dome of St. Isaac's lurks around it seems every corner.

Until you get close and take an arty shot that makes it seem like an angel statue is looming over it.

And of course there's other stuff.

Like this. I don't even know what this building is, and yet I couldn't not take a picture of it.

Or this--one of the watermelon cages (hee) that seem to pop up all over the place. This wasn't there when I went by in the late morning, but had turned up by around 4 when I was chased from the archive (by the great archivist--I'm not complaining!).

Or then there's helpful advice from the city of St. Petersburg. These say, from left to right, "choose sport not beer," "an honest man does not buy a contract," and "don't drink and drive" (more or less).

Or this--the remnants of a building in the center. Obviously, from the patches of different colored wallpaper and paint, an old apartment building.

Or some, er, rather explicit public art.

And of course, everywhere in the old center, even here at the Mikhailovskii castle, where Emperor Paul was MURDERED, there are wedding parties. It's a little hard to tell in this one, because the bride's wearing a totally chic knee-length white coat, but it's a wedding party nonetheless.

September 19, 2009

This, yes, this, was my view as I sat at the breakfast table in at my B&B in Bath. Lovely, gazing out over the city, with (usually, though not in this picture somehow) glowing blue skies above and peachy buildings below.

Of course, the fact that I'm gazing out over the city does indeed mean that getting to the B&B meant going up. Which I would have realized if I'd looked more carefully at a map and noticed that a couple of the roads leading to it had the word "Hill" in their names.

I had a full day of wandering around the city in truly glorious late summer/early fall weather. I took the free walking tour of the city sponsored by the mayor's office, and in our case led by a charming Welshman who settled in Bath a couple of decades ago. We saw lots of Palladian architecture, which is all about balance and symmetry (though here, in the Royal Crescent, it's been slightly sullied by differences in cleaning and glazing).

I saw some signs of the coming of fall, as in the turning of the ivy leaves on this building, again an architecturally important spot on Queen's Square.

I went into the Abbey, which had remarkable ceilings, and such clear light on a day like that. Everything seemed to glow.

So did the algae in the Roman Baths--here's a view of the side/source pool, looking into the Pump Room--that's that semi-circular window. You can go in and have a taste of the water, which I didn't do.

Then this looks out from the lower level of the big main pool, up at the balcony, and out at the Abbey spires. It's another place with literally layered history, layers that have been partially excavated for all to see.

And then I went to the Assembly Rooms, where above all I loved the chandeliers. I can't imagine how they looked when covered with candles--nor can I imagine having the responsibility of lighting them all without knocking them (or the chandelier as a whole!) down.

And then, Oxford. I was mostly caught up in my conference, which turned out to be a right good time. It was my first ever women's history conference, and quite an interesting experience for that. My paper was well received, and I got a couple of good ideas for how to interpret my somewhat inexplicable data, so academically it was a total success. And in other ways it was a success, too--I met some interesting people, learned that the Brits can totally drink me under the table, and got away a little bit to take some pictures, too. Above is my arty shot of the Radcliffe Camera.

And then there's this, of another crazy ceiling. This one comes from an open room in (I think) the old Bodleian--which is, yes, the library.

Or a somewhat familiar feeling building in New College.

Or yes, more ivy, this on the outer building of Christ Church college.

Or a partial shot of that college's giant courtyard. It was Open Day, so they had people pouring through, with a bouncy castle in the gardens. But also, the coolest thing I did the whole trip (to a geek like me, at least)! There was a little tent in the gardens where a bell ringer (like, someone who does the big bells in a cathedral tower) was doing hand bell ringing demonstrations, and I got roped in to finish out a group. So I got to ring bells 9 and 10 for a rousing round of Polly Wolly Doodle, and of something else I don't remember.

September 14, 2009

That's pretty much how I ended up stopping in York on my way back south from Scotland. It sounded like an interesting choice when I first started flipping through guidebooks, and even though it might have made more sense to travel south down the western side of the country, the idea of visiting it stuck with me. And as it was lovely, lovely, lovely, I'm quite glad it did.

To go between my B&B and the center of town I went through the Museum gardens, which included not only a museum, but the ruins of a 13th century (I think) abbey--St. Mary's Abbey. Remarkable.

And then you go out of the gardens, across a street, around a corner, and, boom, you're confronted with a massive cathedral--or, this being England, the York Minster. (And you'll also note that the weather started to change to the spectacular, too.)

Such a lovely ceiling.

Such odd little figures on monuments. This crying angel was right across from a lovely plaque listing all the organists of the minster going back to the 1400s.

Such amazing windows, though it's a little hard to tell from this. It's the age of the windows that's amazing--hundreds and hundreds of years old, and they somehow survived wars and fires and all sorts of damage.

It also has a very tall central tower up which one can climb. Very slowly, in tiny little circles that start to fade into one another. Fortunately they control access, so they let a group up, get them all up to the top, and then let the group down. It was gorgeous just being there. There were also CRAZY swooping birds, which may have had something to do with the increasing wind and changing weather (it rained briefly a bit later, and someone I talked with on the train the next day said it stormed like crazy not far away).

You also look down into the old city, which has little crowded streets with buildings leaning over them. It's a funny mix, too--there's a drug store, and a YARN STORE, and then also a Starbucks (right down on the corner at the bottom of the picture) and very touristy-friendly shops. So it's both for people who live there and for people who are just visiting.

I'm also perhaps thinking that because I'm reading a novel that takes place in York--Behind the Scenes at the Museum, by Kate Atkinson, who I think is one of my favorite current writers. Anyway, it kind of makes me think of LIFE in York, not just the passing throngs of tourists. Interesting.

The old city is also mostly still surrounded by walls, and you can go along and walk them. If I remember correctly, this is on a part of them that seems to have been built directly over the walls of a Roman garrison that was located here. There's a truly great (or so I thought) exhibit in the undercroft of the Minster based on the archeological finds they made when doing a massive project to... well, to stop the Minster from falling down. They found layers of history under the church. And then the outsides of the church tell histories, too--like the strict puritans who came through and got rid of most of the "graven images," which means that there are places where you can see statues used to sit, but no longer do.

I had a picnic dinner on a bench in the Dean's Garden, which is a little park right under the Minster (I have a very soft spot for the food to go from Marks & Spencer, especially an edamame and tuna salad that I ate at least four times on my trip). Even with the wind picking up and the sun hiding, it was a gorgeous spot to sit and gaze.

September 10, 2009

I left Edinburgh for Glasgow midday on Sunday. I learned a couple of things on the train ride. One, that the quiet car on the train is kind of nice--because in the car I was in there were a group of lads heading back home after what I assume was a drinking kind of weekend. And thanks to the volume at which a couple of them spoke, I learned a bit about that, and a whole bunch about their love for the oeuvres of Will Ferrell and Judd Apatow. I'd have moved, except that they'd colonized the forward facing part of the train car and I wasn't going to give up a forward facing seat.

So, I had absolutely no expectations for Glasgow--I knew it had older bits, but that it had a lot of nineteenth century growth that was perhaps the bigger part of the city. And in the end, I was pretty charmed by the city, except for one thing. That was the buses. I took a lot of buses one day, but in almost every case I was kind of randomly choosing one that seemed to go where I was headed. There were no bus maps to be had--at the tourist information office they said they were being reprinted, so they had none to give out. Frustrating!

Anyway. I've just realized going through my pictures that I have none of one of the most important figures in Glasgow architectural and artistic history--Charles Rennie Mackintosh. I went to his house/museum on the University of Glasgow campus, and also to the Glasgow School of Art, where I took the very nice student guided tour of the building he designed. As someone who grew up in a place with a lot of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, I couldn't help be at once reminded of those, but also struck by the very real differences in their styles. Very interesting, though.

I also went to a couple of other museums--the Hunterian Art Gallery, which is tied in with the Mackintosh house, and which featured AMAZING stuff by Whistler, for one.

And the very first thing I did in Glasgow, once I got to my B&B, was go to the Kelvingrove Museum, which I loved to bits. I stayed not even a five minute walk away from the place, and so walked over to enjoy the rest of the afternoon there. It's a funny museum, because it's half art museum, half natural history museum (oh, plus a big organ in the main hall, which was being played while I was there, most awesomely), brought together really very cleverly, I thought. One side was mostly art and one mostly natural history/history, but both sides had bits and pieces from the other mixed in.

So this was the atrium for the art (or, "Expression", contrasted with "Life") side, with sculptures, but other stuff, too. You can't see it, but next to the stairs on the left were small glass cases with stuffed animals (like, taxidermy stuffed, not teddy bear stuffed). That's where the title of this post comes from. As I walked by, a little boy ran up to one case that had a stuffed calf in it and exclaimed, "it's a coo!" I'm charmed by the Scottish coo--and even saw some big hairy Highland coos in a field the next day.

Basically, I just thought this was a cleverly curated museum that'd be great for kids, but was informative for adults too. They did things like arrange the French art (i.e., Impressionists, mostly) room not by artist, but by grouping portraits, then landscapes, then still lifes, etc., and really giving nice descriptions of the genres as well as the individual paintings. Just a great museum.

I saw the highland coos (I didn't take a picture, because they were mostly all standing with their extraordinarily muddy rear ends toward me) in the fields near the Burrell Collection, another museum, this time based on a private collection, located in a park in the southern reaches of the city. It had an eclectic mix of things, from icons to antiquities to armor to needlework. Included in the latter was this.

It's a beaded tray. Crazy and opulent and ridiculous, on the one hand, but totally cool on the other, as far as I'm concerned.

I also went to walk around the Glasgow Cathedral--which dates from the 13-14th centuries, and is big and black and impressive.

The outsides were a bit worn by time--it's that pollution grey that permeates so much of the stone here.

But the insides were a little dark and grey, too. I'm sure that was in large part because of the day, which brought a few glimpses of sun but which was mostly fairly gloomy. But there's something about the stonework, too, that was a bit on the dark side.

It also had an interesting vaulted ceiling... though a very different one to the kind I just saw today, from several centuries later! Just wait...

(Incidentally, I realized something the day after all of this... some time ago I was told something about ISOs, and manually futzed with the ISO setting of my camera. And since then I haven't been all that happy with a lot of my pictures... like this one, where the light and dark are just out of sync. So the day after this I reset my camera to the automatic ISO setting, and am much, much happier with the pictures I've been taking since then. Again, just wait. And also, this is a perfect example of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing.)

Up behind the cathedral is the Glasgow Necropolis, which I also walked around for a goodly while, It's up on a hill, and is both quiet and quietly spectacular.

Then the weather started to turn, so I headed back to the West End, where I was staying, under the looming tower of Glasgow University, by a park and a rushing river.